Dannys Own Story | Page 4

lived together a good many years and quarrelled about everything else under the sun, and was running out of subjects. A new subject kind o' briskened things up fur a while.
But finally they went too far with it one time. I was about two years old then and he was still calling me Company and her calling me Dunne. This time he hits her a lick that lays her out and likes to kill her, and it gets him scared. But she gets around agin after a while, and they both see it has went too fur that time, and so they makes up.
"Elmira, I give in," says Hank. "His name is Dunne."
"No," says she, tender-like, "you was right, Hank. His name is Company." So they pretty near got into another row over that. But they finally made it up between em I didn't have no last name, and they'd jest call me Danny. Which they both done faithful ever after, as agreed.
Old Hank, he was a blacksmith, and he used to lamm me considerable, him and his wife not having any kids of their own to lick. He lammed me when he was drunk, and he whaled me when he was sober. I never helt it up agin him much, neither, not fur a good many years, because he got me used to it young, and I hadn't never knowed nothing else. Hank's wife, Elmira, she used to lick him jest about as often as he licked her, and boss him jest as much. So he fell back on me. A man has jest naturally got to have something to cuss around and boss, so's to keep himself from finding out he don't amount to nothing. Leastways, most men is like that. And Hank, he didn't amount to much; and he kind o' knowed it, way down deep in his inmost gizzards, and it were a comfort to him to have me around.
But they was one thing he never sot no store by, and I got along now to where I hold that up agin him more'n all the lickings he ever done. That was book learning. He never had none himself, and he was sot agin it, and he never made me get none, and if I'd ever asted him for any he'd of whaled me fur that. Hank's wife, Elmira, had married beneath her, and everybody in our town had come to see it, and used to sympathize with her about it when Hank wasn't around. She'd tell em, yes, it was so. Back in Elmira, New York, from which her father and mother come to our part of Illinoise in the early days, her father had kep' a hotel, and they was stylish kind o' folks. When she was born her mother was homesick fur all that style and fur York State ways, and so she named her Elmira.
But when she married Hank, he had considerable land. His father had left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent it up, and mebby Elmira would get some new clothes.
But when I was found on the door step, the land was all gone, and Hank was practising reg'lar, when not busy cussing out the fellers that had bought the land. Fur some smart fellers had come along, and bought up all that swamp land and dreened it, and now it was worth seventy or eighty dollars an acre. Hank, he figgered some one had cheated him. Which the Walterses could of dreened theirn too, only they'd ruther hunt ducks and have fish frys than to dig ditches. All of which I hearn Elmira talking over with the neighbours more'n once when I was growing up, and they all says: "How sad it is you have came to this, Elmira!" And then she'd kind o' spunk up and say, thanks to glory, she'd kep' her pride.
Well, they was worse places to live in than that there little town, even if they wasn't no railroad within eight miles, and only three hundred soles in the hull copperation. Which Hank's shop and our house set in the edge of the woods jest outside the copperation line, so's the city marshal didn't have no authority to arrest him after he crossed it.
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